The Gothic in Children's Literature : Haunting the Borders

From creepy picture books to Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, the Spiderwick Chronicles, and countless vampire series for young adult readers, fear has become a dominant mode of entertainment for young readers. The last two decades have seen an enormous growth in the critical study of two very different genres, the Gothic and children's literature. The Gothic, concerned with the perverse and the forbidden, with adult sexuality and religious or metaphysical doubts and heresies, seems to represent everything that children's literature, as a genre, was designed to keep out

Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Series Editor's Foreword; Introduction; 1. The Haunted Nursery: 1764-1830; 2. Cyberfiction and the Gothic Novel; 3. Frightening and Funny: Humour in Children's Gothic Fiction; 4. Between Horror, Humour, and Hope: Neil Gaiman and the Psychic Work of the Gothic; 5. On the Gothic Beach: A New Zealand Reading of House and Landscape in Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters; 6. High Winds and Broken Bridges: The Gothic and the West Indies in Twentieth-Century British Children's Literature

7. The Scary Tale Looks for a Family: Gary Crew's Gothic Hospital and Sonya Hartnett's The Devil Latch8. Haunting the Borders of Sword and Sorcery: Garth Nix's The Seventh Tower; 9. Uncanny Hauntings, Canny Children; 10. Hermione in the Bathroom: The Gothic, Menarche, and Female Development in the Harry Potter Series; 11. Making Nightmares into New Fairytales: Goth Comics as Children's Literature; 12. Fantastic Books: The Gothic Architecture of Children's Books; 13. The Night Side of Nature: Gothic Spaces, Fearful Times; Contributors; Index

From creepy picture books to Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, the Spiderwick Chronicles, and countless vampire series for young adult readers, fear has become a dominant mode of entertainment for young readers. The last two decades have seen an enormous growth in the critical study of two very different genres, the Gothic and children's literature. The Gothic, concerned with the perverse and the forbidden, with adult sexuality and religious or metaphysical doubts and heresies, seems to represent everything that children's literature, as a genre, was designed to keep out

Cover; Title; Copyright; Contents; Series Editor's Foreword; Introduction; 1. The Haunted Nursery: 1764-1830; 2. Cyberfiction and the Gothic Novel; 3. Frightening and Funny: Humour in Children's Gothic Fiction; 4. Between Horror, Humour, and Hope: Neil Gaiman and the Psychic Work of the Gothic; 5. On the Gothic Beach: A New Zealand Reading of House and Landscape in Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters; 6. High Winds and Broken Bridges: The Gothic and the West Indies in Twentieth-Century British Children's Literature

7. The Scary Tale Looks for a Family: Gary Crew's Gothic Hospital and Sonya Hartnett's The Devil Latch8. Haunting the Borders of Sword and Sorcery: Garth Nix's The Seventh Tower; 9. Uncanny Hauntings, Canny Children; 10. Hermione in the Bathroom: The Gothic, Menarche, and Female Development in the Harry Potter Series; 11. Making Nightmares into New Fairytales: Goth Comics as Children's Literature; 12. Fantastic Books: The Gothic Architecture of Children's Books; 13. The Night Side of Nature: Gothic Spaces, Fearful Times; Contributors; Index